Kyrie: Poems

By Ellen Bryant Voigt

Book Overview

In this mosaic of sonnets, her fifth collection, Ellen Bryant Voigt takes on a monumental challenge: to conjure up the influenza pandemic of 1918-19, a little-recorded event that killed 25 million worldwide, half a million in America alone. The Nation calls Kyrie "an astonishing collection . . . so spare and tightly woven, yet so mindful of the cadences of the speaking voice, that the poems read like verse drama."

Starting with the family, Voigt creates voices that gather into one vast community story, a "true tour de force" (Boston Sunday Globe) that speaks to our own time of plague.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0393315614
• ISBN13: 9780393315615
• Release Date: September 1996
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Length: 80 Pages
• Weight: 0.26 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.8" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

"Once the world had its fill of war"

Kyrie, Ellen Voigt's 1995 collection of poems, takes the Influenza Epidemic of 1918-1919 as its inspiration. Voigt's narrative poems create distinct characters (the members of a rural American family) in order to illustrate the suffering and the small redemptions of the winter of 1918-1919. The poems are written as letters, prayers, songs, and even sorrowful curses as the daily life and the inner thoughts of various family members are explored. One poem beautifully describes a bed used by the family: "This is the double bed where she'd been born,/ bed of her mother's marriage and decline,/ bed her sisters also ripened in,/ bed that drew her husband to her side..."Other poems deal with marriage and piano-playing, as well as hogs and chickens. Voigt is truly a master of the narrative poem; these untraditional, free-verse sonnets are musical and wry. What other contemporary poet can riff on hogs "Hogs aren't pretty but they're smart,/ and clean as you let them be" AND write such good metaphors: "We rode the mule to lessons, birds on a branch--/you know what it means to have your own piano?" Voigt's illustration of a lesser-known chapter of American history is profoundly written, and her characters are inviting. Any reader will enjoy Kyrie.